Beth Anne Austein

Host and Producer

Beth Anne Austein has been spinning tunes on the air (The Folk Show, Dancing With Tradition, Freeforms), as well as recording, editing and mixing audio for Montana Public Radio and Montana PBS, since the Clinton Administration. She’s jockeyed faders or "fixed it in post” for The Plant Detective; Listeners Bookstall; Fieldnotes; Musicians Spotlight; The Write Question; Storycorps; Selected Shorts; Bill Raoul’s music series; orchestral and chamber concerts; lecture series; news interviews; and outside producers’ programs about topics ranging from philosophy to ticks.

Ways To Connect

It's not an old wive's tale: cranberry helps prevent and treat urinary tract infections. And it's not just the acidity: a compound in cranberries and blueberries keeps bacteria from sticking to bladder and urinary tract walls. Cranberries are high in several kinds of antioxidants, including proanthocyanidins, which give the ripe berries their vivid red color.

In the 1672 book New England Rarities Discovered, author John Josselyn described cranberries:

Kaya Juda-Nelson left Missoula for college in Boston, excited to leave. But when events brought her back to Montana, instead of finding herself lonely or bored, she found that silence and spacious views provided "company as well as solace." In Tony Abeyta's essay, "Tsankawi's Trail," the Navajo painter describes an ancient Pueblo village in New Mexico "where spirits of past and present parallel infinitely:"

Join host Marguerite Munsche Sunday evening, November 23, 2014, for our second broadcast from the Missoula Symphony Orchestra's 60th season, Darko Butorac, music director and conductor. The program, titled "Red, White and True," was recorded November 9, 2014, in the Dennison Theater at the University of Montana-Missoula.

Diane Carlson Evans was a U.S. Army Nurse during the Vietnam War. She survived indescribable trauma, felt resented when she returned to the U.S., and kept her bitterness and her tears inside for many years. Then she founded the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project, and helped hundreds of women vets tell their stories of Vietnam.

Jon and Greg discuss different members of the allium genus - which are actually lilies - and recommend basic tips for cooking onions, specifically onion ragout. Onion quiche, onion pizza, and onions as a side-dish are recommended by Greg. Jon says, "Often I look at a new recipe and if there are no onions, I wonder, "What's wrong with this recipe?"

"An Insect's Guide To Surviving the Winter," written by Ashley King, read by Caroline Kurtz.

With the help of fur, hair, or clothing, warm-blooded mammals keep a consistent internal temperature, no matter the air temperature. That's not true for insects. How do they survive the cold of winter?

Among the artifacts discovered in the tomb of Egypt's Tutankhamen - objects meant to ease the boy king into the afterlife - were 3,000-year-old bulbs of garlic. Giving as well as receiving, Tut supplied daily rations of garlic to his pyramid-building slaves, for endurance and health. Garlic is a fabulous heart helper: its blood-thinning and anti-clotting abilities may slow down atherosclerosis and lower blood pressure.

Poet and novelist Damon Falke's West is a region that begs us to stop and look closely. Falke remembers a mysterious cemetery, perched on the rim of a plateau, where as a young man he would stop and watch and wait, not quite knowing why. In his poem, "Dove Creek" Falke reveals the deep observation practiced by his father, on trips into the desert:

Dean Blount was a Cold War-era Russian language specialist in Turkey. Back home on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation, he is trying to ensure that his two Native languages - Dakota and Nakota - are passed on. At the Presbyterian church where he is a lay minister, he has taught his tiny congregation to sing hymns in Dakota.

Chef Ben Thorpe, a home-schooled native of rural Idaho, is the chef at Fort Benton's Grand Union Hotel. From seminary, to an abbreviated career in classical dance, to ministerial work, then a stint as a wine steward, Thorpe came to his culinary career in a roundabout way. "I think the ability to please people, to take ingredients and put them together, and to see people truly feel happiness, is really life-changing.

The Moscow Ballet’s North American tour of "The Nutcracker" includes performances in Great Falls, Missoula and Butte, and features a company of forty professional dancers, clothed in elaborate costumes and surrounded by colorful sets. But it's not just Russian dancers on stage. In each city, many of the ballet's roles are danced by local ballet students.

Ever since nomadic tribes helped spread wild garlic from Central Asia to far-flung parts of the globe, garlic has helped humans fight microbes. Louis Pasteur recognized its antimicrobial power, as did doctors in WWI and WWII battlefield hospitals, where injured soldiers were given garlic to prevent infection and gangrene. Today's warnings of a "post-antibiotic" future mean garlic's power may turn out to be handy as drug-resistant bacteria become widespread.

Walking around old-growth forests this winter, if you're lucky enough to see fur-lined tracks leading to the base of a tree, or scat containing porcupine quills, look up. Scan the treetops. You might catch a glimpse of a marten or a fisher, two members of the mustelid family that roam Montana's winter landscape.

When we think of "health," we often think about the well-being of an individual. But Lindsey Krywaruchka, Emily Epperson, and George Burns work on behalf of a different definition of "health:" the well-being of an entire human population. All three work in the public health programs of Montana's Department of Public Health and Human Services.

Tessa Heinemann loves digging up history. On an archaeological dig in the old gold-mining town, Virginia City, MT, she discovered 150-year-old remnants of toys, jewelry, and medicine bottles. "I find it incredibly rewarding to transform the experience of casual tourists. They hold artifacts in their hands and begin to imagine the bustling streets of a real community."

Montana arachnologist, artist and feminist Dr. Bea Vogel has studied and worked all over the U.S., but found her way back to Helena, Montana: "(Some people) feel that they're owned by where they live. I've always felt that way: I'm of Montana; I need to be here. This is just about my idea of paradise."

Nearly one hundred years ago, L.L. Nunn, an electrical pioneer and the manager of a Colorado power company, founded a two-year college for young men in California's Deep Springs Valley. Deep Springs College isn't the typical American junior college: it's tiny, with just twenty-six students. No one pays tuition or fees. It's located on a remote cattle ranch and alfalfa farm. The student-faculty ratio is 5:1.

Michael Marsolek talks with Kathy Witkowsky and Linda Grinde, playwright and director of a new comedy, "No Time For Love." Inspired by a real-life evening spent trying to communicate with a friend obsessed with texting his love interest, Witkowsky describes the plot of "No Time For Love" as "taking that theme to ridiculous extremes. The main character finds herself frustrated as she tries to have authentic relationships with people who are constantly being pulled in many directions."

In 1905, author Harriet Keeler wrote about the inner bark of the slippery elm tree: “It is thick, fragrant, mucilaginous, demulcent, and nutritious. The water in which the bark has been soaked is a grateful drink for one suffering from affections of the throat and lungs.”

Tamara Linse - "a writer, cogitator, recovering cowgirl" - grew up on a Wyoming ranch where adult women told dumb blonde jokes. Linse's book of short stories is called How To Be A Man. "They thought of themselves," she writes of the ranch women, "as profoundly set apart, a sort of third gender - not quite a man but definitely not a woman.

The second installment of the story of Joyce Vashro, an Englishwoman who married a U.S. serviceman and came to Montana 70 years ago. She and her baby embarked on the Queen Mary with 2800 other war brides. Like them, she says she hardly knew the husband she was rejoining, and had no idea what awaited her in Montana.

courtesy of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, University of Montana

Historian, member of the Montana Legislature, and long-time Missoula resident Diane Sands describes in fascinating detail the story of women's suffrage, both in Montana and nationwide. November 3, 2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the state.

"My way of learning was never through a book - it was always through experience. Going out and finding things and thinking about them is basically how I have learned everything. When it comes to teaching a student something, I want that student to do the same thing. I think reading is overrated, quite frankly, and I think there's no reason to read a book and learn about someone else's idea. I think it's more important to experience something and have your own idea."